May Day Piketty Blogging

I see that Patrick Deneen has already referenced the inevitable author on this first of May, by which I mean not Marx but Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century (I’d link to the Amazon page for the book, but why bother – you can’t get a copy).

I don’t want to steal my own thunder, because I’m working on a longer piece about the book. But I did want to say a couple of things about this whole business of an “elite vanguard” – to whit, to remind us all that all political movements have leaders, that leaders of major political movements are elites of some sort simply by virtue of that position, and that therefore by definition all political movements are elite-led. Moreover, the kinds of people with the combination of talent and independence of means necessary to devote themselves to opinionating are also, by definition, elites of some sort. Christopher Lasch, G. K. Chesterton, Patrick Deneen and myself included.

The question, therefore, is whether one approaches that relationship – between leaders and led – with a class analysis or whether one argues on the classical presumption of reasoned democratic discourse.

Marx did the former. He wasn’t trying to reform or restrain capitalism; he wanted capitalism to triumph completely, so that it could be overthrown completely. And he aimed to convince a key group of intellectual leaders of the inevitability of proletarian revolution, so as to convince them to become the vanguard of that revolution. There are any number of reasons why specific individuals might become “class traitors,” but such were indispensable to the Communist movement in practice, for the reason articulated above.

Piketty is emphatically in the latter camp, which is why I think its odd to compare him, politically anyway, to Marx. He implicitly assumes a social democratic framework for thinking about the questions he raises, and he explicitly pitches his book not as a rallying cry to revolution but as a modest proposal to policy elites for how to deal with an emerging threat to that assumed social democratic consensus.

Moreover, Piketty’s predictions are almost an inversion of Marx’s in that Marx saw industrial capitalism shredding traditional hierarchies, while Piketty sees his inexorable law of r>g leading to the reconstitution of a hierarchical society familiar to writers in the 19th century. Marx saw capitalism taking the world forward – to crisis, but then through that crisis to utopia. Piketty sees capitalism taking the world backward – to a patrimonial order where inheritance matters more than anything. And if there’s one thing a hereditary elite does not want, it’s to shred the social order, because they are already at the top.

I’ll say more about my thoughts on Piketty’s thesis, his history, predictions and policy prescriptions, in the near future. But for now, it’s very strange that he himself seems to want to be compared to Marx, when their perspectives are so different. And his predictions (assuming they are persuasive) pose a distinctly different challenge to conservatives like Deneen, who believe both in social order and social equality, than did Marx’s.

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12 Responses to May Day Piketty Blogging

To the extent, he’s studying capital and it’s relationship to society, he’s like Marx. That didn’t mean he’s like Marx in other ways. Also, can you be more specific about how Piketty compared himself to Marx?

First, you’ve summarized very well why I’m not terribly impressed by Piketty, in short that he’s more Keynesian than Marxist, much like, say, Thomas Frank on a different plane.

Though I generally appreciated Deneen’s piece, he seems to be projecting Lenin a bit too much back on to Marx. The recent biography by Jonathan Sperber makes clear that though Marx was firmly committed to the cataclysmic means symbolized in his day by the French Revolution, his ends, however much at times he was loath to admit it, remained mostly anodyne social democratic, and could have scarcely conceived of the Leninist party, much less totalitarianism.

Incidentally, Sperber argues that the common interpretation of the passages of the Manifesto Deneen quotes and embraces is quite contrary to its actual original context. That I find less than convincing, as Sperber erred more than a bit too much on the side of his most admirable goal, to place Marx squarely and unambiguously in his 19th century context.

Moreover, Piketty’s predictions are almost an inversion of Marx’s in that Marx saw industrial capitalism shredding traditional hierarchies, while Piketty sees his inexorable law of r>g leading to the reconstitution of a hierarchical society familiar to writers in the 19th century.

This doesn’t sound right. The ‘traditional’ hierarchies that capitalism shreds are the hierarchies of religion and culture, leaving behind the single hierarchy of class. Piketty’s r>g is also about the increasing concentration of wealth (although he doesn’t call it class). The big difference is that Marx thinks the whole system will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Piketty does not.

In the late nineties and early two thousands economists spoke of a new economy. One where technology and public policy had changed the game and we were living in a great moderation. Funny how one financial crisis followed by lingering stagnation can change the conversation to one of a wealth over concentration that moves the world back to feudalism.

American capitalism is cyclical. Over a cycle wealth concentrates. Then capitalism imposes its own cure for this very real affliction. We call it a depression. -r>-g would have been capitalism’s response to this concentration of wealth had the financial bailouts not occurred. I won’t argue whether bailouts were right or wrong. I will say this- take a good look at American capitalism in the twentieth century and I think you will see it is the natural tendency of capitalism to self correct for these over concentrations. A prediction- we are one bad recession away from this self correction we are living through leading to an economic revival. We need to update our economic management protocols to reflect the cyclical nature of our economy.

The Economist states,
“Mr Piketty also argues that the return on capital can be propped up by technology, which could lead to new ways of substituting machines for people”
Then The Economist states,
“The 100th industrial robot does not provide nearly the same boost to production as the first.”

can mr millman cite a passage where marx suggests that a vanguard will lead the socialist revolution? that’s lenin. marx believed that capitalism would generate a working class so large and dispossessed they would take mass action.
yiu americans are so obsessed with ‘liberal elites’, you cant even remember a time when politics was a mass process.

The third sentence of Piketty’s book explains the title: “Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century?” Piketty thus sees himself as exploring the same issue as Marx. Like the good academic he is, he treats Marx respectfully, but critically. Marx thought the concentration of wealth inevitable. Piketty does not agree in theory, but thinks that in actual fact r will normally exceed g, resulting in such concentration.

HAS Thomas Piketty, indeed, compared himself to Marx? AFAICT from my readings so far in C21C he respects Marx’s work as an economist (in a era when said “discipline” barely deserved the name), but tends to dismiss Marx’s political philosophy and prescriptions. It seems more like the term “Marxist” gets thrown around just to smear Piketty, lest his apocalyptically dangerous and radical notion that letting unlimited wealth pile up at the very tip of the socioeconomic pyramid might somehow be harmful to the economy of the world in general…

Could someone please tell me something? Does this r>g theorem mean that the rate (r) of return on capital will exceed the growth (g) of the economy? That’s what I got from reading the Wikipedia entry on the Piketty book, but wanted to make sure before commenting further. Thank you.